An Ending...?
Tuesday, June 18th, 2013 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
retsukoYebisu and I watched "Mama", which is an excellent suspense film... except for the last fifteen minutes, at which point the plot overbalances, the story slips into slo-mo, and all the buildup from the previous story evaporated into no scary payoff and a very clumsy set-up for a sequel. (I say 'suspense' on purpose because while there were a few jump scares, the story was more atmospheric and creepy than genuinely terrifying.) In fact, the whole ending reminded me of an RPG where the players are suddenly dithering about what to do, and the storyteller is too kind to step in and make some action happen, or hopes that they'll find another solution to the problem altogether. Anyway, this wasn't the first horror movie to dash my hopes like this; Splice was another where the whole equation fell completely apart, to a ludicrous and embarrassing degree.
So, I started to wonder: what's the most satisfying way to end a horror movie? How would I have ended "Mama" in particular? There's nihilistic approach of "everyone dies," which sometimes makes sense, sometimes not, and I don't think would have worked well in this storyline. There's also the magical "everything's fixed!" method, but that would have been equally unsatisfying, given the set-up the film had presented. I started to think of great horror movie endings, and all I could come up with off the top of my head was the twist "gotcha!" at the end of the excellent Korean horror movie "A Tale of Two Sisters", which I don't want to give away here, but was so good that I thought about the movie for weeks afterwards. The ending of "Cabin in the Woods" is certainly... uh, definitive, for lack of a better word. Horror stories are some of the most difficult to end, simply because the audience's expectations are going to be so high, and the permutations of the conclusion to the story will radically change people's perception of the movie as a whole, whereas with other genres, I think there's a little more leeway.
But now I'm curious: what's your favorite horror movie ending? Least favorite? Spoilers are fine. I'm far more interested about what makes a horror plot successful than preserving my knowledge of a few movies/TV shows.
So, I started to wonder: what's the most satisfying way to end a horror movie? How would I have ended "Mama" in particular? There's nihilistic approach of "everyone dies," which sometimes makes sense, sometimes not, and I don't think would have worked well in this storyline. There's also the magical "everything's fixed!" method, but that would have been equally unsatisfying, given the set-up the film had presented. I started to think of great horror movie endings, and all I could come up with off the top of my head was the twist "gotcha!" at the end of the excellent Korean horror movie "A Tale of Two Sisters", which I don't want to give away here, but was so good that I thought about the movie for weeks afterwards. The ending of "Cabin in the Woods" is certainly... uh, definitive, for lack of a better word. Horror stories are some of the most difficult to end, simply because the audience's expectations are going to be so high, and the permutations of the conclusion to the story will radically change people's perception of the movie as a whole, whereas with other genres, I think there's a little more leeway.
But now I'm curious: what's your favorite horror movie ending? Least favorite? Spoilers are fine. I'm far more interested about what makes a horror plot successful than preserving my knowledge of a few movies/TV shows.
